Trump Killed Climate.gov Last Summer. Scientists Just Brought It Back

Last summer, after Trump shuttered climate.gov—the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s portal on climate science—the site’s former program manager called it a “deliberate, targeted attack.” Another former NOAA official, once its acting chief scientist, accused the administration of trying to keep inconvenient climate data “buried.” Thousands of NOAA staffers (north of 20%) had been either fired, laid off, or forced into early retirement by that point last June—including all ten tasked with producing climate.gov.

But it looks like America’s vaunted private sector really is still a place where entrepreneurial visionaries can identify gaps in the market and meet the public’s needs: A team of roughly 80 volunteer scientists and former NOAA staffers has resurrected climate.gov as the nonprofit climate.us.

Funded with over $321,000 in crowdsourced donations (and more from one major anonymous backer), climate.us restores the site’s climate “dashboard,” which graphs everything from arctic sea ice to greenhouse gas emissions to fluctuations in radiation from the Sun. It’s also reassembled the old government resource’s entire 15-year history of climate news, as well as blogs by subject matter experts unpacking complex meteorological phenomena like El Niño, maps, status reports, and classroom materials designed to aid climate literacy.

“Trusted climate information should not disappear when politics change,” said Rebecca Lindsey, former managing director of climate.gov and current director of climate.us—in a statement.

“Climate.us is building an independent, durable platform so people can continue to find the data and information they need to understand and talk about climate, and to teach, report, plan, prepare, and make informed decisions,” she explained.

Lindsey’s team found powerful allies among the pool of dedicated (and now grievously underemployed) scientists forced out of public service last year under Trump-aligned billionaire Elon Musk’s perversely wasteful government efficiency initiative, DOGE.

“[Now] we have a lot of expertise outside of the government because of so much brain drain from the government, and we can really stand up things,” geochemist Gretchen Gehrke, cofounder of the nonprofit Environmental Data & Governance Initiative, told National Public Radio last week. “[Climate.us], I think, is a success story of that.”

According to Gehrke, climate.gov had long served as a “hugely important” public resource for raw climate data, context, and analysis. As a scientist turned activist who once worked for the Environmental Protecti